By Achilleus-Chud Uchegbu
There is always a kind of silence that follows a big scandal. It is often not the silence of ignorance. Rather, it is the silence of coordination. In the weeks since the Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council (PFIPC) scandal broke into public view, that silence has been replaced by something almost as troubling. It is a well-oiled chorus insisting that one man, and one man alone, conjured a fictitious federal agency into a N1.3 billion budget line, secured office space at the Federal Secretariat, hosted foreign ambassadors, opened a Central Bank of Nigeria account, and paraded himself before ministries for the better part of a year, all without so much as a nod from anyone inside government. Nigerians are being asked to believe that Adeniyi Adeyemi Matthew did all of this by himself, armed with nothing but his audacity. That story cannot survive contact with the paper trail, and it should not survive contact with public scrutiny either because certain kinds of crime succeed because they involve conspiracy.
However, forgery may be a crime perfected in solitude, but institutional capture involves a lot more than just one man. A single fraudster can print a fake letterhead, but he cannot, by himself alone, get a phantom council listed in the Appropriation Act of a country. He cannot single-handedly walk a nonexistent agency through the Federal Executive Council’s policy approval stages, including budget office reviews, ministerial input, and across the finish line of legislative scrutiny in both chambers of the National Assembly. He cannot, unaided, secure clearance from the Office of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation for international travel to a fintech summit in Canada, nor obtain office accommodation carved out of the federal secretariat, the bureaucracy headquarters of government, nor win approval, and waiver, for over 300 staff positions from the Office of the Head of the Civil Service. If one man could do all these alone and unaided, then, he is a national asset that deserved to be protected.
But, as public knowledge dictates, every one of those steps has a name attached to a signature. They are called accomplices. Documents already in the public domain show the OSGF’s Permanent Secretary for Political and Economic Affairs approving Adeyemi’s travel. They show a former Permanent Secretary at the OSGF’s General Services Office writing to the EFCC requesting office space for the council. They show the National Security Adviser’s office and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs both raising alarms and routing their concerns to the Office of the Chief of Staff and the Office of the SGF. What those documents say is that a scam of this scale and duration is not a magic trick performed by a single illusionist. It is rather a machine, and machines have operators.
What is most striking about the Presidency’s official response is not what it says, but how carefully it is constructed to say nothing that can be contradicted while implying everything that exonerates. We are told, correctly, that the Chief of Staff has no statutory power to appoint agency heads or create government bodies. That power belongs to the SGF. We are told the Chief of Staff wrote petitions to the DSS and the police as far back as October 2025. Both of these can be true, though neither of them answers the actual question Nigerians are asking. The question is: if the Chief of Staff’s office truly had no role, why did Adeyemi allege a demand for a chunk of the agency’s take-off grant, and payments running into hundreds of millions of naira, made specifically through and to that office? Why did the intermediary who allegedly brokered contact between Adeyemi and the Chief of Staff die in a fire at an Abuja hotel one day after the Chief of Staff’s petition reached the police? These are whys that ought to alarm any serious investigator, but they appeared nowhere in the Presidency’s public statement.
A defence that answers procedural questions while ignoring the specific, serious, and documented allegations at the centre of a controversy is not a defence. It is redirection. And a public relations campaign that treats “the Chief of Staff lacks the legal power to appoint agency heads” as equivalent to “the Chief of Staff did nothing wrong” is asking Nigerians to confuse the absence of legal authority with the absence of influence. Bribery does not require a job description. It requires access, and access is precisely what the Office of the Chief of Staff and the Office of the SGF both, self-evidently, had.
It is worth stating plainly what the emerging defensive narrative is already showing. This scandal implicates not one office but two, sitting at the very apex of the federal bureaucracy. The SGF’s office is the one constitutionally empowered to issue appointment letters, and it is the same office whose Permanent Secretary cleared Adeyemi for international travel representing Nigeria abroad. If the SGF’s office signed off on foreign travel for the head of an agency it now claims never existed, then either that office was catastrophically negligent in verifying who it was dealing with, or it knew precisely what it was dealing with and proceeded anyway. There is no third, more comfortable option. Meanwhile, the Office of the Chief of Staff is the office named directly and repeatedly in Adeyemi’s own account of solicited and received payments, an account that, whatever its ultimate veracity, deserves to be tested by investigators independent of the very institution it accuses, not pre-emptively dismissed by that institution’s own spokesperson.
To campaign for the exoneration of both these offices before a single independent forensic audit has been conducted is not “protecting the integrity of governance.” It is asking the public to accept acquittal before trial, delivered by the defendant’s own communications team.
But the Presidency cannot investigate itself. This is the heart of the matter. The Presidency cannot be the sole judge of allegations against its own principal officers. Every institution named so far as having “cleared,” “approved,” or “failed to detect” this scheme, from the OSGF, the Office of the Chief of Staff, the Office of the Accountant-General, the Central Bank, reports, in one way or another, up through the same executive chain now tasked with explaining itself. For instance, a police investigation that concludes no government official can be linked to the fraud, while simultaneously producing documents showing government officials approving the fraudulent agency’s travel, budget codes, staffing, and office space, has not resolved the contradiction. It has restated it.
What the moment demands is not another Presidency press release, however detailed, and not another party statement, however righteous. It demands a transparent, independent, and adequately resourced probe, one that is insulated from the offices under scrutiny, and empowered to compel testimony and financial records, and mandated to follow the money and the signatures wherever they lead, including into the Presidency itself. Anything less is simply recycling the very structure of unaccountability that allowed a fictitious council to draw a budget line in the first place.
Let’s get it right. Accountability is not an attack on government. None of this, however, amounts to a verdict of guilt against any named official. Due process matters, criminal charges against Adeyemi are already before the courts, and the presumption of innocence extends to everyone implicated, including those in the Chief of Staff’s and SGF’s offices. But due process is precisely the argument for an independent probe, not against one. A genuinely impartial investigation is the only mechanism that can either clear these offices credibly or establish where responsibility actually lies. What cannot be accepted is a substitute for that process, which is seen in the orchestrated public campaign, run by the very offices under suspicion, and treats the continued repetition of a denial as equivalent to proof of innocence.
The public is right to be uneasy. A country that allows its most senior coordinating offices to wave away a billion-naira ghost agency with a press statement, while the trail of approving signatures sits untouched in government files, is a country teaching its officials that the only real crime is getting caught. Nigerians deserve better than a story that ends with one convenient villain and two untouched offices. They deserve the truth, and the truth, this time, requires investigators who do not answer to the people they are investigating.